Songs of the Suburbs
I wanted to showcase songs on buildings and the built environment. But it turns out that’s a big topic. So I am limiting it to songs about suburban development.
Start with an obvious choice: Little Boxes, written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and popularized by Pete Seeger.
It is often pressed into service as an anti-development anthem.
Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky-tacky/ Little boxes on the hillside/ Little boxes all the same. There’s a pink one/ and a green one/ and a blue one and a yellow one/ and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky/ And they all look just the same.
Malvina was driving passed Daly City, California and from the highway saw dozens of wood frame houses erecting on the hillside. The whole song came to her at once.
Tom Lehrer called it “the most sanctimonious song ever written.” Malvina does have a detached condescension not only for the buildings but people within:
And the people in the houses/ All went to the university/ Where they were put in boxes/ And they came out all the same/ And there’s doctors and lawyers and business executives/ And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky/ And they all look just the same.
A more personally felt expression of this comes from Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s Pleasant Valley Sunday (1967)
Another Pleasant Valley Sunday/ Charcoal burning everywhere/ Rows of houses that are all the same/ And no one seems to care.
Goffin and King wrote the song after they moved from New York City to West Orange, New Jersey. King found the conformity of “status symbol land” to be stifling and frustrating.
Creature comfort goals/ They only numb my soul/ And make it hard for me to see/ My thoughts all seem to stray/ To places far away/ I need a change of scenery.
The Kink’s Shangri-La (1969) takes the same line of attack towards the UK’s working class suburbs.
Same chimney puff/ Same little car/ Same window-panes
Too scared to think about how insecure you are/ Life ain’t so happy in your little Shangri-La!
The other vector of attack is suburban sprawl over the landscape, especially roads and parking lots.
Cat Steven’s Where do the Children Play?(1970):
Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass/ For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas/And you make them, and you make them tough/But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can’t get off.
Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi (1970):
They paved paradise/ And put up a parking lot.
The Pretender’s My City was Gone (1982):
My city had been pulled down/ Reduced to parking spaces
Modest Mouse Convenient Parking (1997):
Soon the chain reaction started in the parking lot/ Waiting to bleed onto the big streets/ That bleed out onto the highways.
The year after Little Boxes the Beach Boys released a hit that is suburbs friendly.
There’s a world where I can go/And tell my secrets to/In my room/In my room.
In this world I lock out/ All my worries and my fears/ In my room/ In my room. - In My Room (1963).
Private bedrooms are predominantly suburban architecture, especially in the 60s.
And other suburban features soon became associated with music: garage rock, basement tapes, etc. These are good places to write songs!
In the garage/ I feel safe/ Noone cares about my ways. – In The Garage, Weezer(1994).
Alone in my home/ Nobody can touch me. – Alone in My Home, Jack White (2014).
But these songs are not wholly positive. The theme of safety and seclusion belie the places outside where the worries and fears await you.
The most famous pro-suburbs song is Our House by Crosby, Stills, and Nash (1970).
Our house/ is a very very fine house/ with two cats in the yard/ life used to be so hard/ Now everything is easy cause of you.
Graham Nash wrote it about Joni Mitchell’s home in Laurel Canyon where they lived together for two years. The features mentioned (fireplace, yard, illuminated windows) and the coziness and serenity captures what Americans cherish about their suburban homes.
The emerging pattern is that pro-suburban songs are about the interiority of suburban life. The sanctuary of rooms, or the house that love built. Anti-suburban songs tend to be looking outside. Missing from Our House are any descriptions of the other houses, the streets, or neighbors.
An interesting counterexample about Our House: Joni Mitchell had written music with a pastoral feel before, e.g. Sisotowbell Lane (1968) But then, five years after Our House, she releases a dark song about a housewife trapped in the suburbs: The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975):
He put her in a ranch house on a hill/ She could see the valley barbeques from her windowsill…He gave her a room full of Chippendale/That nobody sits in/Still she stays with a love of some kind/ It’s the lady’s choice/ The hissing of summer lawns.
Is this inspired from the same house? There is evidence of that if you look at the relationship between Mitchell and Nash.
Mitchell said of Nash, “Graham was a sweetheart, but he needed a more traditional female. He loved me dearly, but he wanted a stay-at-home wife to raise his children.”
Graham said: “I think Joan thought if she married me, I would ask her to stop writing and just cook pie. That is so insane to think that.”
Two points of view, idyllic and dark, about the same house? If it’s true it nicely captures America’s conflicted feelings about the ‘burbs.
That specific idea of men using suburban homes to contain their women was explicit in the 1930’s blues standard “Outskirts of Town,” popularized by Ray Charles (1961):
But if we have any children/ I want them all to look like me/ When we move way out on the outskirts of town/ I don’t want nobody always hanging around.
What about punk rock, you ask? You didn’t ask. But yes it is true that punk is famously hostile to conformity and status. But punk is also almost completely suburban in origin.
Early 70’s punk bands like the Ramones and The Stooges suppressed their suburban roots and never sang about them.
There are only a few punk songs about suburbia in the 80s (The Descendents Suburban Home (1982); Screeching Weasel’s Hey Suburbia (1988). These songs playfully and ironically embrace the relationship between punks and their suburban homes.
In Punk Rock Girl (1988) the Dead Milkman celebrate a romance born of joyriding and creating chaos in shopping malls.
We went to Philly Pizza Company and ordered some hot tea/ The waitress said “well, no we only have it iced” / So we jumped up on the table and shouted “anarchy!”
By the 90s punk rock is singing positively about suburbia. There are punk songs that celebrate places of refuge (Green Day’s Christie Road (1992); or nostalgia (Yellowcard’s Ocean Avenue (2003)).
Less Than Jake’s Boring Town (1998) captures the bittersweetness of never leaving home:
Just talked to this girl used to live here on my street/ After all these years you’re here and it’s still just you and me/ Sometimes I can’t believe after all these years I just think I’ll never leave here/ She said it’s so funny how life runs out so fast/ Let’s take another drink and here’s to the past.
By the 90’s and 00’s most bands had got organized in the suburbs. We start to get songs that about suburbia falling short of its promises.
The Offspring’s The Kids Aren’t Alright (1998) is about a suburban neighborhood that has let its young people down.
When we were young the future was so bright/ The old neighborhood was so alive/ And every kid on the whole damn street/ Was gonna make it big and not be beat/ Now the neighborhood’s cracked and torn/ The kids are grown up but their lives are worn/ How can one little swallow so many lives?
Not coincidentally The Offspring’s hometown of Garden Grove was hit hard by gang violence and the crack epidemic.
The song also has early references to the suburbs as physically deteriorating. A lot of suburban infrastructure was 30 or 40 years old.
Another “suburban promise” song is Everclear’s I Will Buy You A New Life (1997). The singer is fantasizing about a fresh start in the suburbs.
I will buy you a garden/ Where your flowers can bloom/ I will buy you a new car/ Perfect, shiny, and new/ I will buy that big house/ Way up in the West Hills/ I will buy you a new life/ Oh yes I will.
Everclear’s Art Alexakis grew up in LA housing projects. He’s reminding listeners that many Americans are still waiting to get into the suburbs. It’s a desperate response to those privileged suburbanites who complain of monotony and “creature comfort goals that numb my soul.”
I hate those people who love to tell you/ Money is the root of all the kills/ They have been poor/ No they’ve never known the joy of a welfare Christmas.
These songs are about changing demographics in suburbs, and how to make them work for more people. They are pro-suburbs songs because they want suburbia to do better!
An unalloyed joyful suburb song is “Speeding 72” by Momma (2022). In the music video the band is joyriding through the suburbs in a Volvo 240, singing and sipping on 7-Eleven big gulps. It’s not a problem that suburbs are sprawling:
Meeting up on a Sunday/ Filling up the ashtray/ Nothing gets in our way/ Always in a new place.
Look out your window/ Driving in a different town/ Same street, same home/ Buckle up, so we can go/ Speeding 72/ We’re faster getting nowhere/ Baby, we could go there/ Shining on a secret avenue.
You can see that Gen X/ Millenial bands have a different take on suburbs. Baby Boomers were lifelong suburbanites, but today Millennials are more evenly split between cities and suburbs. They chose cities in their twenties, leading a large urban renewal in the 2000s-2010s. Then, in the the late 2010s-2020s, Millennials started choosing suburb and exurb communities where they could afford right-sized housing and raise children.
In 2010, at the peak of urban renewal and right before the reversal, Arcade Fire released a grammy-winning album: The Suburbs.
The entire album explores tension between urban and suburban life. It beautifully captures the conflicted feelings that Gen X and Millennials have about the suburbs.
Familiar themes reemerge, like sprawl:
First they built the road/ Then they built the town/ That’s why were still driving around/ And around and around and around and around. – Wasted Hours
Deterioration:
Living in the sprawl/ Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains. – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
And all the houses that they built in the seventies finally fall / Meant nothing at all—The Suburbs
The nostalgic connection to childhood:
In the suburbs, I learned to drive. – The Suburbs
The kids want to be so hard/ But in my dreams we’re still screaming / And running through the yard. – The Suburbs
If I could have it back/ All the time that we wasted/ I’d only waste it again/ If I could have it back/ You know I would love to waste it again. – The Suburbs
The Suburbs album talks about disillusionment of the city as an alternative to the burbs.
City living is superficial and contrived:
So I wait in line, I’m a modern man. – Modern Man
Let’s go downtown and talk to the modern kids - Rococo
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine/ They calling at me, “Come and find your kind”/ Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small/ That we can never get away from the sprawl. – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
And beneath those contrivances is a shocking hostility to life:
I feel like I’ve been living in/ A city with no children in it/ A garden left for ruin by a millionaire inside/ Of a private prison. – City with No Children.
The month of May, it’s a violent thing/ In the city their hearts start to sing/ Well, some people sing it sounds like they’re screaming/ Used to doubt it but now I believe it. – Month of May
Then the city was hit from above/ And just when I knew what I wanted to say/ The violent wind blew the wires away. – Month of May
We are pulled between the city and suburbs, but neither feel like enough:
With my old friends/ It was so different then/ Before your war/ Against the suburbs began. – Suburban War
When we watched the markets crash/ The promises we made were torn/ And my parents sent for me/ From out West, where I was born. – Half Light II (No Celebration)
Some cities make you lose your head/ Endless suburbs stretched out thin and dead/ And what was that line you said/ Wishing you were anywhere but here/ You watch the life you’re living disappear/ And now I see/ We’re still kids in buses longing to be free. – Wasted Hours
The last defender of the sprawl/ Said “Well where do you kids live?”/ Well sir if you only knew what the answers worth/ I’ve been searching every corner of the earth. – Sprawl I (Flatland)
This tension is well understood by my Millennial cohort. Today the generation is bifurcated: 48% of Millennials report living in the suburbs in 2020. And their lifestyles diverge: suburban millennials are more likely to have families, depend on cars, and generally their lifestyles more resemble their baby boomer parents. We love the suburbs, we hate the suburbs. You might call it a suburban war?
Finally, Arcade Fires’ album contains a genuinely new theme about suburbs: they are built to change.
This town’s so strange/ They built it to change/ And while we sleep/ We know the streets get rearranged. – Suburban War
They keep erasing all the streets we grew up in. – Suburban War
Strange how the half light/ Can make a place new/ You can’t recognize me/ And I can’t recognize you/ We run through these streets/ That we know so well/ And the houses hide so much/ But in the half light/ None of us can tell.
Took a drive into the sprawl/ To find the house where we used to stay/ We couldn’t read the number in the dark/ You said “Let’s save it for another day” – Sprawl I (Flatland)
Took a drive into the sprawl/ To find the places we used to play/ It was the loneliest day of my life. – Sprawl I (Flatland)
Let’s take a drive through the sprawl/ Through these towns they built to change/ Then you said the emotions are dead/ It’s no wonder you feel so estranged. – Sprawl I (Flatland)
In this town where I was born/ I now see through a dead man’s eyes/ One day they will see it’s long gone.— Half Light II (No Celebration)
Now our lives our changing fast / Hope that something pure can last. – We Used to Wait
Win Butler’s hometown of The Woodlands, Texas is a master planned suburban community outside Houston Texas. In Butler’s youth it was a secluded, quiet burb with green spaces and parks. Today it is a major corporate, medical, and high-end lifestyle destination.
This has happened to suburbs around the country. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s the high demand and cheap credit brought in-fill development to thousands of green suburban acres, creating new roads, housing, and shopping centers.
(It did not happen in cities where the built environment was already more fully complete).
For many Americans the old suburbs now feel now feel radically different, even unrecognizable, from childhood memories.
Butler does a nice job of invoking how disturbing and destabilizing that can feel.
OK that’s the story of suburbia in song! Here is a Spotify playlist of all the songs mentioned above. Maybe I will try to do something similar for American cities.